A thunderclap of displaced air and water belled outward from the intruder city. The watchtowers shuddered under the onslaught of Xxiphu’s appearance. One swayed, cracked, and as if in slow motion, toppled backward with a groan of protest. When it came down, it broke into hundreds of pieces and sent up a plume of dust.
“The Spire of Winter’s Peace!” yelled Taal, pointing at the fallen tower.
The eladrin nodded. “I prepared the foundations to fall should the Eldest ever come here,” she said. “Less evidence implicating me will come to light, which means I have more time to act before my fellow wardens realize I’ve betrayed them.”
Images of the knights, servants, and other staff who lived within the Spire of Winter’s Peace whirled through Taal’s mind. It was too far to see any detail, but it was likely the collapsed tower meant their deaths. More than a hundred lived there. Or had.
He took a deep breath and focused on the other towers.
Though he’d never before observed the Watch from beyond its edge, he recognized Solstice Tower, Summer Mist, and the Spire of the Moon, the latter of which was the largest and best garrisoned.
A boom of splitting rock drew Taal’s eyes down to the cliff face. A mote of stone as large as an eladrin warship peeled away and launched itself directly at Xxiphu.
Malyanna gasped. She brandished the Dreamheart and uttered a word slippery with urgency.
The balcony lurched, and the cliff wall began to recede.
No, Taal realized, it was Xxiphu that receded, sailing into the darkness toward the discontinuity over which the towers watched and defended. The halo of water and cloud, ripped from Faerun’s surface, was pulled in the city’s wake.
His mistress planned to steer them into the discontinuity, past which they’d find the Citadel of the Outer Void. Horror spider-walked down his spine.
Despite the long years he’d served the eladrin noble, Taal had never faced the possibility that he might one day interact directly with the entities his mistress commanded and served in equal measure. Acid churned in his stomach.
“Taal, compose yourself,” Malyanna said.
He nodded, feeling the constraints of his oath bolster him. He kept his gaze locked on Forever’s Edge.
The onrushing mote birthed from the cliff face continued its approach. It was gaining on them, despite Xxiphu’s acceleration. If the mote got close enough, it would detonate in a massive flash of green, or red, or most likely, sky blue. Would the explosion be large enough to destabilize Xxiphu and kill the aboleths within its slimy hollows? He hoped so, despite it meaning his own death, and … despite his oath.
“The mote will catch us,” he felt compelled to say, pointing.
“No,” she said. “Watch.”
Malyanna brandished the Dreamheart again, and muttered more foul invocations.
A trio of kraken emerged from their recently claimed rookeries that gaped on Xxiphu’s steep sides. Swimming through empty space, they swarmed together in a knot of flailing arms. Then the krakens propelled themselves directly into the path of the onrushing mote.
The three kraken together were only about a tenth of the mote’s size. Still, their association with Xxiphu meant they carried taint enough to trigger the mote. One moment it tumbled in placid silence toward the clump of kraken. The next moment the void was illuminated in a sun-bright flash of blue fire. The light seared Xxiphu’s pocked face, and rocked the flying obelisk from top to bottom.
When the glare faded, the mote and the krakens were so many drifts of fading embers falling into darkness.
“Only one kraken remains,” murmured Malyanna.
“Plus a city of aboleths of every shape and size imaginable,” Taal said. “Some of the old ones surely rival a kraken in size.”
“True,” replied the eladrin noble. “But commanding members of the Sovereignty strains my strength, all of which I will need to take up the Key of Stars. Creatures of Faerun that I’ve subordinated, on the other hand, are eager to do my will.”
Taal’s face grew warm. He wondered if she counted him among those “eager” to accept her commands.
“Not that it should matter,” she continued. “With the lead we have, I can open the Far Manifold before the Watch realizes what Xxiphu’s appearance portends. Even if they raise all the platoons of the Watch and launch a pursuit across the gulf and into the Citadel, it will be too late for them to stop me.”
Taal restrained a frown.
“Let’s improve our point of view,” the eladrin said.
She gripped the Dreamheart. White fire limned the irregular sphere. She slowly rotated the relic in place. As she did, the entire bulk of the floating city followed suit. The view of the receding Watch on Forever’s Edge rotated to the left and away, until only darkness remained beyond the balcony. They faced directly into the void, toward the city’s hidden destination.
Taal gazed into the gulf. He saw Xxiphu was gaining on lesser defensive motes previously launched from the Edge. The massive face of the city overran and smashed the sentinel particles like sea flotsam broken on a ship’s prow. The motes sparked and detonated, but none were large enough to do any lasting damage. Still, some were so big the balcony shuddered and creaked. Each time that happened, Malyanna only laughed.
Taal saw things flitting in the void, briefly illuminated by distant mote detonations. They streamed out of the black, each one a unique snowflake of aberration. The light was too erratic for him to catch more than fragmented suggestions of corrupted physiologies, some of which aped creatures of the natural world, and some of which defied comparison.
Several man-sized tangles of teeth, horns, and scales arrowed in to flitter like moths around the balcony, keening out a low, raspy melody that threatened to break into comprehensibility. They smelled like a body buried in too shallow of a grave. Malyanna shooed them off with a sharp word and a gleam of power from the Dreamheart.
A serpentlike form nearly as large as a kraken coiled out of the void above them. Its oddly handlike head flexed slimy mandibles resembling reaching fingers. The creature fixed black eyes on the approaching bulk of Xxiphu and paused as if startled. A defending mote launched from Forever’s Edge clipped the beast, exploding in a spray of fire. Half the creature was incinerated, and the other half spun away, creating a nebula of fluid from jetting ichor.
Blinking in and out of sight were cascades of twining hair, as if shorn from a giant’s head, then given unholy life. Several blinked away, only to reappear too close to Xxiphu’s advancing ramparts. They screamed from hidden mouths as their lives were smeared out on the city’s black walls.
The distant, weak stars of the void glimmered beyond it all. Taal couldn’t gaze too long upon them without regret rising like gorge in his throat. More than anything else, they reminded him of his oath to Malyanna, and his unswerving obedience ever since.
Well, not utterly unswerving. He recalled the face of a man with care worn deep around his eyes who he’d met on the tor above Stardeep: Japheth the warlock.
He had told the man more than was absolutely necessary to warn him off. In fact, from a certain perspective, one might argue he’d revealed confidences. Confidences that might even provide Malyanna’s opponents clues on where to find-
The formless stricture of his sworn oath, awakened by the direction of Taal’s thoughts, tightened like a noose around his head and squeezed. He restrained a gasp, lest the eladrin notice.
The power invested in his oath was a constant threat. Usually, it lay like a snake in the grass, content to watch and wait. However, should it judge that he’d stepped beyond the confines of its constraints, it would core out his mind in a twinkling, and make a hollow vessel of him-a mindless automaton. Should he ever betray Malyanna or her aims, it would be his last action as a thinking being.